Why I left Quora

I had been a contributor on the platform since 2017 and as many of the things I’ve done in my little existence, it had all started out of sheer curiosity. I’ve always been one to explore things, especially if it looked like I’d be helping even a single person in the process. It started with a single question that had caught my attention. Before I knew it, there I was… answering questions from stangers to the best of my ability. I was getting more questions and when the French segment of the platform was about to be launched I was contacted to provide content in that language as well.

I was not really looking at it in terms of content creation. It was simply another way I was engaging with the world.

The problem was that, although my pieces were gettinh an increasing number of views and comments, to the point of earning me the title of best writer at some point, people reading my content were often not the ones who needed the information the most. Worse, some of the readers seemed to be your average troll who was only looking to pick fights with a black writer. That’s right! Some people were only there to try to assert their sense of superiority over black writers, trying to turn each comment section into a racist battlefield. As an individual who provides writing services, writing for free on such a platform started losing its appeal when on top of having these trolls trying to pick a fight each time they saw an opportunity, I found myself with a warning from the platforms management. According to them, I had not taken into account the “be nice” policy when posting. I couldn’t see myself waste precious time over issues like this one, trying to see how my very polite but sarcastic text could have been perceived as something worth threatening me over. I’m not a kid anymore. I’m in my forties so the likelihood of having my general tone change now is slim to none. The platform was starting to shift from a social experiment to a place where monetization was becoming a possibility. They had attracted a large readership, thanks to the contributions of people like me over the years. They were not my clients, not my bosses, not my friends and seeing yet another platform offer financial opportunities to contributors located in other places while making these unavailable to valued members loicated elsewhere was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I stopped writing new content around 2020. I thought it would be enough to do that but apparently, some trolls don’t know what digging up old threads mean in forum etiquette and one idle soul came after me over a post dating back to 2018 in June 2022. That’s when I decided to deactivate my account entirely.

I feel my time and energy will be better spent writing original content here, on my website, for my clients, online magazines or for upcoming books.

We sometimes need to know when it’s time to walk away from something that doesn’t serve us or the community any longer.